[Search-l] Yahoo Is Inviting Partners to Build on Its Search Power

[Jimmy Wales]

Fred Bauder wrote:
> Are we looking into this? Do we have an invitation?
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/technology/10yahoo.html
> 
> How would it work for us? Is Yahoo failing anyway into a takeover by
> Microsoft?

It is interesting how much buzz Yahoo is getting out of something that 
is so weakly "open".  It is not open source at all.  It's just an API 
that they are making available "free as in beer".

And how long will it be free?  Until it isn't.

I can't imagine any significant ecosystem developing around something 
like this.  Of course, Facebook has had great success with widgets on 
their proprietary platform, but as I understand this (and I have not yet 
read all the documentation, so please correct me if I am wrong) this 
just allows third parties to access Yahoo's proprietary search 
technology... not to access Yahoo's visitors.

Facebook applications made sense to third party developers because you 
can develop a widget and market it through facebook in exchange for 
(typically) ad revenue from it.

I can see this being a cute tool for some casual mashup development, and 
maybe some major content sites will use it to power their internal 
search.  But I don't see it fundamentally affecting anything.